Facing a New Deadline, Israelis, Palestinians Debate More Talks

After three months of warfare, Israelis and Palestinians are now debating U.S.-drafted peace proposals that require far-reaching sacrifices but mark what is probably the last chance for a settlement under the fast-fading Clinton administration.

President Clinton asked caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to indicate by today whether they are willing to continue negotiations based on compromise proposals that Clinton outlined last week.

Barak has said he will respond positively, but Arafat appeared to be balking Tuesday--and Clinton’s deadline appeared to be slipping.

The president hopes for answers “later this week,” State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker said in Washington. If the two Mideast leaders agree to negotiate the proposals, U.S. officials hope to arrange a three-way summit next week.

Barak and Arafat are already facing fierce protests over the proposals. The U.S. outline reportedly would divide the disputed capital of Jerusalem and require Israel to release up to 95% of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians for an independent state.

Among the reported concessions most painful to Israelis: Their government would back away from its demand for full control of the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Most painful for Palestinians: Arafat would have to relax his demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to what is today Israel.

Israelis and Palestinians would be relinquishing long-cherished ideals that have been at the foundation of their identities. Essentially, Barak and Arafat, if they go ahead, are moving to strike a deal that neither may be able to sell at home.

“This will be an agreement of heartbreak for both sides,” Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari said on Israeli television Tuesday night.

Whatever responses Barak and Arafat give Clinton, the negotiations represent the most serious effort to salvage the pursuit of peace since the collapse of the Camp David summit in July and the months of Israeli-Palestinian violence that have claimed more than 350 lives. The ideas under discussion echo those aired at Camp David but have been refined, diplomats said.

Arafat, however, was not convinced Tuesday of the similarities. “Some positions are much less than Camp David,” he told reporters in Gaza. He said numerous “obstacles” remain, and his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the Palestinians require further clarifications of “vague” elements of the proposal. Arafat plans to send a letter to Clinton to express his “strong” reservations, a Palestinian official told Reuters news service.

Barak has appeared more eager to respond favorably to Clinton’s plan. His popularity in the gutter, Barak faces a tough election battle in just six weeks and believes that securing a peace agreement is the only chance he has of winning. But Barak’s weak standing may render him powerless to enforce a deal. And his opponent, right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon, has said repeatedly that he would not be bound by any agreement that Barak bequeathed him.

Sharon, who leads Barak in all opinion polls by a huge margin, has accused the prime minister of staging a “fire sale” of Israeli assets in his rush to get an agreement. Full-page Israeli newspaper ads Tuesday showed Barak under the headline “The Auction of a Country.”

“The negotiations in Washington are not genuine peace negotiations,” Sharon told a meeting of his Likud Party. “One must remember that Jerusalem belongs to the entire Jewish people, and we have to be the guardians of the walls that were placed in our hands as its trustees as a deposit for generations.”

Barak countered that failure to reach agreement could lead to “an all-out war in the Middle East and the danger of Israel’s isolation in the international community.” The proposed concessions are “tearing me apart,” he said, but are the necessary price to pay.

Under the widely reported proposals, Israel would give the Palestinians a slice of Israeli territory in the Negev Desert to compensate for West Bank territory that Israel wants to keep for Jewish settlers. In addition, Israel would cede control of some of East Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods captured during the 1967 Middle East War, including most of the ancient walled Old City.

The Palestinians would also have control over the Old City’s disputed Al Aqsa mosque compound, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Haram al Sharif, or “noble sanctuary,” to Muslims.

It isn’t clear whether the Israeli government is prepared to cede full sovereignty over the Temple Mount, as some Israeli press reports have suggested, or is offering de facto control. Barak and other officials have stressed that Israel will retain its “special link” to the site, but Barak has pointedly dropped use of the word “sovereignty.”

Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a key Palestinian negotiator, said Tuesday that Israelis were engaged in “verbal trickery” and were trying to retain a form of sovereignty over the lower portions of the Temple Mount by ceding only the surface of the plateau, where Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock shrine sit. Palestinians already have day-to-day control of the compound.

In exchange for Israel’s giving up on the Temple Mount, the Palestinians would give up on their demands that refugees who abandoned or were forced to flee their homes in past wars be allowed to return to what is today Israel.

The “right to return” has long been the centerpiece of the Palestinian struggle; Israelis, who rarely agree on anything, are virtually united in their belief that the return of refugees who now number nearly 4 million would amount to national suicide.

The Clinton plan would allow several thousand Palestinians to return to Israel as part of family reunifications, while the rest would return to the future Palestinian state or stay where they are in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Even if Barak and Arafat reach a framework agreement, Barak cannot enforce it until the Knesset, or parliament, approves. Deserted by his coalition partners, he would find it all but impossible to muster a majority vote in the Knesset now.

Knesset member Limor Livnat of Likud argued that a caretaker prime minister and his minority government have no business negotiating delicate matters of national interest.

“Can Ehud Barak . . . tie the hands of the nation and the state of Israel for generations to come closing a deal on issues which have been the very soul of Judaism and Zionism for thousands of years?” she asked.

Leading rabbis Tuesday demanded that Barak not cede an inch of the Temple Mount. Jewish settlers, especially in the tiny Gaza settlements, vowed that they would not go quietly.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the powerful spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, ordered his members to fight Barak on any concessions involving the Temple Mount. Shas is one of the largest and most influential parties in the Knesset.

Militant Palestinians declared that they wouldn’t brook major concessions to Israel. Marwan Barghouti, a senior leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank who has directed armed militias during the current intifada, said the proposals were “full of land mines.”

“This is an improvement over Camp David,” he said in an interview, “but that comes because of our intifada. So if we continue the intifada, we can get more. We should not be rushing.”

A new poll of Israelis by the respected polling firm of Hanoch & Rafi Smith, to be published today, shows increasing opposition to the kind of peace agreement that appears to be in the works. Whatever minimal faith or trust that may have been created between Israelis and Palestinians in the years since the landmark 1993 Oslo accords has evaporated in the last three months of clashes.

The Smith poll also asked when full peace will be achieved. Sixteen percent of the respondents said it will come in the next five years; 45% said in 25 years or never.